I don’t know about you, but I’m an absolute Sucker for site stats!
It’s simply amazing to see how far and fast information can spread.
Check out all the countries where our trailer’s been viewed since
we uploaded it this summer… Continue reading →
This summer I had the opportunity to watch A Lot Like You as part of the Seattle International Film Festival. Amazing! The film raised so many important questions and provided such critical insight into how interconnected our experiences of race, class, gender, trauma and sexuality can be in forming our cultural identity. I immediately wanted to figure out a way for my graduate social work students to engage with this powerful film.
Fortunately Eli Kimaro is allowing University of New England students to screen her film as part of their Human Behavior in the Social Environment course. As our course syllabus states, this class is designed:
“to develop and refine our consciousness of the continuous, dynamic and historical relationship that persists between human beings in any social context.”
This film will undoubtedly help our students deepen their discussions and explorations of many of the course themes. Worth noting, is that A Lot Like You could effectively be used in other courses, such as diversity or trauma courses.
Students are being asked to consider the following two questions about this film: Continue reading →
In Dec 2009, I talked with Susan McCabe (Voice of Vashon) about the new direction our film was taking. In this clip, we consider the gap between the film I set out to make vs. what I discovered while filming in Tanzania…
A Lot Like You is playing 8pm tonight at the Vashon Theatre.
Tickets are $10.00 ($8 students/seniors) and benefit the DoVe Project.
Please join us for a pre-show get together at the Old Movie Magic ($20)..
By LESLIE BROWN
Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber Editor
Nov 09 2011
From left, Eric Frith, Pete Droge and Eliaichi Kimaro in Frith’s studio on the west side
of Vashon, where the three of them spent a lot of hours producing “A Lot Like You.”
– Leslie Brown/Staff Photo
When Seattle activist Eliaichi Kimaro first approached Vashon film editor Eric Frith about the documentary she hoped to make, she had in mind a fairly straightforward biographical story — one that explored Tanzania, her father’s tribal culture and the role of the World Bank in Africa.
But what unfolded over the course of years of work, much of it in Frith’s small studio behind his house on the west side of Vashon, was an intensely emotional exploration not only into Kimaro’s cultural heritage but also her past, her family’s past and a set of family secrets that had been tightly held for decades.
Along the way, Kimaro — supported by Frith and Vashon musician Pete Droge — dug deeper into her extended family’s history as well as her own remarkable but painful childhood, a childhood marked by a brief, untold period of sexual abuse.
What emerged is “A Lot Like You,” a tender narrative that tells a story not only of genital mutilation and rape but also the complexities of familial relationships set against the backdrop of an ancient tribal culture.
How can a documentary about rape and mutilation be tender? In part, because this story is seen through the lens of Kimaro, a woman who spent years helping victims of abuse, and told largely by her family — her vibrant African father, her keenly observant Korean mother and a pair of Tanzanian aunts who possess a quiet dignity. But it’s also tender because Kimaro focuses on both the wide sweep of her family’s history as well as the intimate relationships that bind them. Continue reading →
This Thursday, the theatre hosts a benefit screening of A LOT LIKE YOU with proceeds going to the DoVE Project, the island aid group for domestic violence survivors. Director Eli Kimaro’s documentary uses a wealth of island talent with familiar names, but the story at the heart of her film is “difficult, loving, and riveting,” about families, gender, multi-cultural truth and identity. Come meet the filmmaker and her team and help raise funds for the DoVE Project!
A LOT LIKE YOU
Nov. 10 only, 8 pm
Benefit screening for
the DoVE Project
“A springboard for community engagement to get people thinking and talking about female genital mutilation, gender violence, mixed-race issues, multicultural families, the search for identity.”
The Stranger
via Nina Milligan @ News from the Vashon Theatre.
“I wonder if the artist ever lives his life — he is so busy recreating it.”
~Poet Anne Sexton
[From VashonMaury-Island Beachcomber]
A film with a powerful message
A prize-winning new documentary, “A Lot Like You,” will screen at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, at the Vashon Theatre. The film is directed by Eliaichi Kimaro, a first-generation American with a Tanzanian father and Korean mother who traveled to Tanzania in 2004 to make a film about her father. Instead, she ended up telling the stories of female members of her father’s family in Tanzania and the culture of violence and abuse that often pervades their relationships with men.
A number of Islanders were involved in the film. Pete Droge produced the film and composed music for it, and Elaine Summers was the film’s executive music producer. Eric Frith served as producer, editor and co-writer, and Jeff Hoyt was a voice coach on the film. Terri Bassett provided graphics and animation. The screening is a benefit for the DoVE Project, an organization that helps survivors of domestic violence. Tickets are $10.
(Feature article coming next Wednesday–
the first group interview with Pete Droge, Eric Frith & Eliaichi Kimaro…)
indieWIRE’s blog, Shadow and Act, previewed A Lot Like You for its upcoming screening at the African Diaspora International Film Festival in New York on Thursday 12/8.
If you’re in town, I will also be speaking on a panel about “Monetizing Independent Cinema” on Saturday 12/10 at 2pm at Columbia University (Teacher’s College).
Hope you can join us there!!
From Shadow and Act:
A film we profiled earlier this year will be making its NYC premiere at the upcoming African Diaspora Film Festival, which runs from November 25 – December 13.The documentary is titled A Lot Like You, and its short story goes… Eliaichi Kimaro (also the film’s director) is a first-generation American filmmaker, with a Korean mother and a Tanzanian father, in search of her roots, tracing her father’s footsteps back to Mt. Kilimanjaro, where she discovers the beauty and brutality of the life he left behind, and translates that into her own personal legacy.
The 80-minute film screened as a work-in-progress at the San Diego Black Film Festival earlier this year, had its official world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival in May, and will screen at the ADFF here in NYC on Thursday, December 8 at 8:30PM, at the Schomburg Center.
A Q&A with filmmaker Eliaichi Kimaro will follow the screening, along with a catered reception.
On Tue 11/1, Pete, Eric and I sat down with Leslie Brown at the Beachcomber, who tapped into the story that’s been waiting to be told.
Together, we reflected on our intense (and ongoing) collaboration on this project…our deeply personal journey to unearth the heart of our film, how the evolving score shaped the tone and pace of our narrative, and why our tagline–The truth has no borders–resonates so strongly. The story will run in Wednesday’s paper, in time to promote our 11/10 benefit screening for the DoVE Project at Vashon Theater.
At Pete’s suggestion, we videotaped this 80-minute interview. We look forward to sharing some highlights with you in our upcoming weekly video mini-series beginning 11/14 (on our soon-to-be-revamped facebook page!)
HUGE thanks to all who came out tonight,
to Connie and Jake for making this event possible
by placing the winning Strangercrombie bid for this screening,
and to Central Cinema for creating such a fabulous venue
for film enthusiasts and filmmakers alike!!